


Said Eurythseus to Heracles (Second of the Twelve Labors)

by Luminous_Bluebell



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, revenge is best served after sixty eight years on ice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-15
Updated: 2014-08-15
Packaged: 2018-02-13 05:12:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2138244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luminous_Bluebell/pseuds/Luminous_Bluebell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's a weapon. Point, shoot, get the job done. Weapons don't care about collateral damage. Weapons don't have or use judgment. Weapons don't even have skills. They have uses. (He has several. He's a knife. He's a gun.) The sniper rifle in his hand isn't an extension of himself, like someone used to -</p><p>He's an extension of the rifle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Said Eurythseus to Heracles (Second of the Twelve Labors)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tumblr user eposetties](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=tumblr+user+eposetties).



> Of course I wrote the second before I wrote the first. Of course. Flying without a beta so the mistakes are my own.

_Cut off the head and two more shall take it’s place_

He was only vaguely familiar with how to gather intelligence at the beginning. Things changed from his time in the Red Room, and at the core of his programming, he was a weapon. Amend. He was a soldier. Before…

Before.

He’s a weapon. Point, shoot, hit the target, get the job done. Weapons don’t make judgments, don’t determine who is the enemy. Weapons don’t care about collateral damage. Weapons don’t even have skills. They have uses. 

(He has several.

He’s a knife, he’s a gun. He's an Asset.) The sniper rifle in his hand isn’t an extension of himself, like someone used to -

He’s an extension of the sniper rifle. He’s raw power and contained explosions. He’s steel and titanium and gunpowder. He’s the lock, bolt, and barrel. So when he lays flat against the roof of a building, when he lines up the shot, exhaling as he squeezes the trigger, he doesn’t feel anything. Doesn’t feel anything as the bullet hits it’s mark. Two kills, one shot. Maybe after the two go down he feels something like relief. Maybe the relief gets obscured by the static in his head, the noise that’s trying to make sense of itself.

He goes through the list to clear the static. He’s not here to salvage anything. He’s here to clean up. ‘ _Make it look like an accident._ ' Distant echoes of old orders.

Fires are easy enough to cover as accidental. The building was old and isolated. No one would investigate.

_Cauterize the head, none can take it’s place._

_Make it look like an accident._  
The next ones were too easy. Weapons developers working with radioactive materials may be careful in the labs, but just one mistake would be enough. Repeated exposure to the same material in their food? Would look like a mistake. Wouldn’t raise any red flags in an autopsy. Not for people that didn’t matter much in the first place.

Politicians, lower level ones, were disconnected enough from the rest of the chain of command that they were oblivious enough when he swept them out. Ones that were higher up were getting nervous. Quick to change their alliances. And once they were voted out, like Stern, they were easy targets. 

STRIKE teams, he didn’t really have to take much care. Operatives were lost all the time. It was the one time he could swear he felt different. He felt… lighter… distracted, but… a good kind of distracted. When he caught up to Rumlow? Well. He may have missed the kill shot by a few centimeters once or twice. Or five times. He lost count.

Sometimes he loses hours in between missions. Sometimes he relives things. Like the man with the round face, the bottle glasses, and the heavy German accent. The one who gave him the arm. The one from before… before… something.

An old archive tells him this man is Arnim Zola. It also tells him that Zola has been preserved in an old Army base, but when he gets there, the place is nothing but rubble, dust, and scorch marks. He kicks a rock into one of the already smashed up screens, reduces a few of the processors into dust. There wasn’t much more he could do there. 

So he moves on.

He’s been through a year and a half of this until he runs into the man on the bridge. He and the one with the wings - the one who had wings, he destroyed them - are looking over a file. Their lips move, and he knows it’s his. He strains his ears, leaning in closer to the window, and he hears a name. Alexander Lukhin. He would wait until they went out. They had to eat, but he… it wasn’t a necessity. 

The Asset never needed it.

The file was familiar. Not in the sense that he remembered any of what was in it, but in the sense that… he knows what goes in them. He knows what to look for. He finds what he can on Lukhin, and… something tugs at him to go through the rest of it. He leafs through it, briefly. He sees the faces from the flashes, his hands shake. He puts the papers back, leaves it open on the exact same page as it was when he got in, not even a centimeter off, and disappears out of the window before he feels his stomach clench. It’s empty, and he heaves up air.

_… Shaped the century…_

They don’t have any security around Lukhin’s room. Which means that no one really knows what the man has done. What is “research” has been doing. The Asset has been picking up on disguises, has trained himself into mimicking how people move, how they act. He puts on scrubs and a surgical mask. The epinephrine came off the crash cart fairly easily, and went into the IV bag next to Mr. Alexander Lukhin just as easily. 

He lifted the address off the man’s chart. Went and found the notes in code. The work that shaped the past century: Red Room research, the Winter Soldier project… something about the Cosmic Cube… how unfortunate that a water pipe burst and waterlogged seventy years of data. In twelve different storage facilities. Really a tragedy.

There were going to be people who tried to follow in the footsteps of people who made HYDRA as powerful as it had been before, but he wasn’t concerned with them. He was concerned with making the HYDRA of old pay. 

As far as he was concerned, they paid. Dearly.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](http://jackzimmermemes.tumblr.com).


End file.
